Leoti L. West (1851 1933) had longed for the opportunity to be west and grow up with the country. In 1878, at the age of twenty-seven, West left her Iowa home to teach at a new school in Washington Territory. Undertaking the two-week journey alone, the young teacher arrived in a Northwest that was still very much a pioneer territory. The school that West opened was one of the first in the area and soon attracted students from all over the Northwest. By the end of West s first term, her original class of seventeen had grown to nearly one hundred students housed in a small schoolroom. In 1881...